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Report: Deutsche Telekom to help with Boot to Gecko

Mozilla – the non-profit organisation behind the Firefox web browser – will reportedly receive development support for its custom standalone web operating system from Deutsche Telekom. Quoting informed sources, Financial Times Deutschlandreports that the German telecommunications provider will help Mozilla with "Boot to Gecko" (B2G). A spokesperson said, without providing any further details, that Deutsche Telekom and Mozilla have been collaborating on research for some time.

Late last week, it was confirmed that the Mozilla Foundation first plans to present the system to the public at this year's Mobile World Congress (MWC) event in Barcelona. The developers have been working on B2G since mid-2011 and plan to create an open ecosystem that can compete with the established proprietary platforms. Boot to Gecko will be based on open source code and will adopt a part of Android's code base, but it won't be compatible with Google's mobile operating system.

The Foundation also plans to introduce its own market place for web apps at the MWC; it is being positioned as a platform where developers can market apps that are based on open source web technologies such as HTML5, JavaScript and CSS. However, Mozilla said that it will only open the store to consumers "later this year". The Mobile World Congress event is due to begin on 27 February.